Long Wandering Prayer

So many of us experience guilt and frustration about our prayer lives. We want to experience God's presence, to grow towards interceding, meditating and worshipping as earnestly as the 'prayer warriors' and saints that we read about. When we try, however, our thoughts are distracted and we can end up feeling bored and even irritated by the whole exercise.

In this book, author David Hansen offers the imaginative solution of 'wandering prayer': literally wandering in the countryside, along a beach or simply through the neighbourhood where we live - in the presence of God. As we wander, our thoughts can flow freely - speaking to God about whatever pops into our head, or pausing to reflect on whatever is before us, 'considering the lilies' as Jesus told us to do. Is our drive to control our minds in prayer - to focus on one thing or stick to one list - actually a way of hiding from God?

Summary of contents
Chapter 1 Long prayer
Chapter 2 Wandering prayer
Chapter 3 Long wandering vision
Chapter 4 Battering the heart of God
Chapter 5 Worthless guilt about things that don't apply
Chpater 6 How can something I'm so bad at be GOd's will for my life?
Chapter 7 The good stuff

David Hansen is a Baptist pastor in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, having formerly worked in Montana. He has written The Art of Pastoring and A Little Handbook on Having a Soul for IVP USA and also writes for Leadership Magazine (published by Christianity Today).

From Julian Meetings Magazine} December 2002 Anne Hibbert says in her foreword, '...this is Brother Lawrence's {Practising the Presence of God} for the 21st century.' Such language seems over the top, especially for Anne Hibbert, and I read the book curiously, wondering what could have caused her to praise it quite so extravagantly. The first thing to strike me was that David Hansen and I have things in common. He grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and his mother let him wander for hours as a child in the marshlands near their home. I grew up in West Sussex, and my mother let me wander for hours as a child on the dunes and shingle banks along the shoreline. We both took the love of solitary wandering with us through all our schooldays, and made excuses to walk unnecessarily long ways round from school to home. We wandered through our student days, and we are wandering still. Gradually I reached the view that Anne Hibbert was, as usual, measured and prayerful in her praise. This is a great book. I say it as a plain truth - David Hansen's simple, understated style conceals profound thinking and obedience to God; his theology, evangelical through and through (Hansen is a Baptist minister), has the lucid awesome depth of a Maria Boulding. Long Wandering Prayer is a book about walking alone with God, about prayers that go on for days, rather than minutes, but are without conscious strain because they are, by and large, without conscious attention. We walk knowingly, with God; but what we are aware of is walking, and sometimes God - not usually what we are supposed to be praying about. Without conscious strain, I said - but not without tears. Hansen quotes Bonhoeffer: 'Intercession means no more than to bring our brother into the presence of God, to see him under the cross of Jesus as a poor human being and sinner in need of grace ...we see him in all his destitution and need'. And we weep as we walk, wandering in the paths of God. Do read Long Wandering Prayer. It will not fail to give you joy; it might just change the way you pray, always.

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